Images of Chichen Itza and Uxmal by esoteric archeologists Alice Dixon and Augustus Le Plongeon, who discovered and named the Chac Mool, and who also believed the Mayans were related to the Egyptians, founders of the Atlantis, inventors of the telegraph, and founders of the Masonic orders.

"My appreciation of the drawings of Frederick Catherwood and the paradoxical elements that appear when these drawings are observed next to the restored monuments became a main area of concern in my work. During the summer of l984, I had the opportunity to work in the Yucatan area, photographing the Maya sites drawn by Catherwood from the same vantage points that he used when making his camera lucida drawings. In this way, I started to compile the elements of a work-in-progress called The Catherwood Project, a visual reconstruction of Stephens and Catherwood's expeditions. I continued this project in the summers of l985 and l986, covering other sites in Yucatan and the Chiapas region in Mexico. During December and January of 1987/88 I completed the itineraries of the two expeditions, photographing the sites of Quiriguá in Guatemala, and Copán in Honduras. My intention when starting The Catherwood Project, which resulted in nearly 4,000 black-and-white photographs and l,800 color, was not only to reappropriate these images from the colonial period, but also to visually verify the results of archaeological restorations, the passage of time, and the changes in the environment. In this 'truth effect' process, issues having to do with colonialist/neocolonialist representation became more central, particularly during the last section of the project."LK

Ruben Ortiz-TorresThe Past is Not What it Used to Be,Selección de fotografíasPlata sobre gelatinaCortesía del artista y Galería OMR, México2003-2009

"Former sites of ancient civilizations have become tourist destinations. Avid entrepreneurs have recreated some of these sites in different locations around the world far from their original settings. During the 19th century traveler photographers documented the original sites in the Yucatan or the Holly Land to show a European and North American public the exotic marvels of these distant lands. I document the perhaps more exotic reproductions of these marvels that with globalization are popping up all over the world losing their link to a specific culture or nation. I use similar processes like the ones used by the traveler photographers such as salt, platinum and cyanotypes. However to be able to do that I have to make digital negatives using a hybrid process that creates a fake representation of the past like the architecture it portrays. The objective is not just to document a simulacrum but also to reflect on how analog photography has become an archeological relic while digital imagery an illusory reality. I do not use digital software to create the often-absurd montages encountered in the images but some architects and designers probably did."ROT

"The town of Frontera Corozal was created in the 70s as a modernization and urbanization project in Mexico. 601 Chol families were relocated to identical plots of land by the Usumacinta River. Working from the idea of the impossibility of an inventory of the natural world, I asked the citizens of the town to physically draw in space the contours of an imagined natural landscape or of their own constructed space. I worked with the community council (18 comuneros) to make an inventory of all that exists within the town. The inventory was then narrated by a town council member through the makeshift speaker system that serves as the townʼs preferred method of public communication."BS

fake mayan arch, gateway to the tomb of conceptual archeology

visible structure in the space between the fake walls that sustain the mayan arches

Alias Editorial,Robert Smithson: Hotel Palenque 1969-1972Translation and publication of Robert Smithson's conference on Hotel Palenque at the University of Utah in 1972.Commissioned for the exhibition 'Incidents of Mirror Travel..."2011

"A meaning of the Spanish word alias, now in disuse, but the one we prefer, is “differently” (“de otro modo”). Alias publishes books differently, with a style and form all its own. We propose an alternative publishing mode: by copying the original or adapting to it, Alias detaches the text from its origins and places it in a new context. Alias is the twin book, the “alias book”. Alias Publishing Project’s purpose is to spread the work and ideas of authors who are particularly significant to contemporary art. Creations that, for reasons and circumstances we cannot enter into in this space, have not been translated, published or disseminated in the Spanish-speaking world. Or, if published, then are either out of print or were never distributed in Mexico."Alias is a non-profit publishing project of artist Damian Ortega.http://www.aliaseditorial.com

"In 1999, my wife and I stayed in the Hotel Palenque in the Yucatan region of Mexico, a hotel perhaps now best known as the subject of a piece of work by the American artist Robert Smithson made during his stay in the hotel (with his wife and gallerist) some thirty years previously. Smithson took a number of photographs of the hotel, which he used in a lecture given to architecture students at the University of Utah in 1972. One morning, I replicated these photographs, alongside some new, stylistically-similar images, on a single roll of film. This film was then placed in one of the hotel’s safety deposit boxes; the film was not retrieved upon our departure and I retain the key, the box now transformed into a time-capsule, a document of the hotel as it was that summer morning."

This map, a photocopy of Robert Smithson's own drawing Map of the Hotel Palenque (1969), was used by Jeremy Millar while in the hotel to help determine the positions from which Smithson took his photographs; these were marked in ink upon the map, and his own series of photographs were subsequently taken from these numbered positions.

"The match boxes in Mexico are odd, they are 'things in themselves'. While one enjoys a cigarette, he can look at his yellow box of 'Clasicos De Lujo-La Central.' The match company has thoughtfully put a reproduction of Venus De Milo on the front cover, and a changing array of 'fine arts on the back cover..."Robert Smithson, 'Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan', 1969

Archeologist of German origin Jürgen Kurt Brüggemann (1942-2004) dedicated 32 years of his life until his dead, to the excavations and restoration of the archeological site of Tajin in Veracruz.

Jürgen Brüggemann, diagram, from Time to Space

"This also brings to mind the concave mirrors of the Olmecs found at La Venta, Tabasco State, and researchd by Robert Heizer, the archeologist... 'The Jaguar in the mirror that smokes in the World of the Elements knows the work of Carl Andre,' said Tezcatlipoca and Itzpalotl at the same time in the same voice. 'He knows the Future travels backwards,' they continued."Robert Smithson, 'Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan', 1969

The “One Hotel Stationery (Speculative Film Prop)” is part of a group of works that together form a film treatment or the beginning of what could be a script related to Kabul, Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel in that city and the impossibility to understand, represent and react to the current social and political situations in Afghanistan. The work takes as a starting point García Torres’ research on the whearabouts of the One Hotel owned by Alighiero Boetti during the 1970’s in Kabul, Afghanistan.

"Mexican sculpture seems to me to be true and right. Its ‘stoniness’, by which I mean its truth to material, its tremendous power without loss of seriousness, its astonishing variety and fertility of form invention and its approach to a full three-dimensional conception of form, make it unsurpassed in my opinion by any other period of stone sculpture."Henry Moore, in 'The Aztec World' by Elizabeth Hill Boone, Smithsonian Books, Washington, 1994, p.132.

"At one point they evidently decided to build some floors, and decided that that wasn't a very good idea so they demolished them, but left this spiky, irregular, cantilevered effect coming off the side of the wall. It sort of suggests Piranesi, I don't know whether you know of the prison series of Piranesi, but they are full of these floors that really go nowhere and stairways that just dissappear into clouds..."Robert Smithson, 'Hotel Palenque', 1972

Mauricio Maillé, Gabriel Orozco y Mauricio RochaApuntalamiento para nuestras ruinas modernas/Scaffolding for our Modern Ruinsdocumentación de instalación en el Museo de Arte Moderno, Bienal de espacios alternativos, Primer lugar/ documentation of the installation done in 1987 at the Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City at the Bienal of Alternative Spaces, obtaining the first prizeCourtesy the artists and kurimanzutto, Ciudad de México1987

Cerith Wyn Evans' fireworks outside of the Museum, with the Tamayo Museum sign on the background

"There is a rather wistful palm tree there, well-placed, and it gives you the feeling that you are in the tropics, a sense thaty you have really made it, you have really got down there and are seeing palm trees for the first time."Robert Smithson, 'Hotel Palenque', 1972

The Tamayo Museum, designed by architects Abraham Zabludovsky and Teodoro Gonzalez de Leon in 1981 in a shape reminiscent of a pyramid or zigurat, the museum is soon to be under construction with a new expansion under way...

first rock or Museo Tamayo's new expansion...

Exhibition dates: hopefully until november 27 if construction works permit it....

“The existence of most of these ruins was entirely unknown to the residents of the capital; - but few had ever been visited by white inhabitants; - they were desolate, and overgrown with trees. For a brief space the stillness that reigned around them was broken, and they were again left to solitude and silence.”John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Yucatán, Vol I, Harper & Collins, New York, 1843, p. iii.

“If you visit the sites (a doubtful probability) you find nothing but memory-traces, for the mirror displacements were dismantled right after they were photographed. The mirrors are somewhere in New York. The reflected light has been erased. Remembrances are but numbers on a map, vacant memories constellating the intangible terrains in deleted vicinities. It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found. The expunged color that remains to be seen. The fictive voices of the totems have exhausted their arguments. Yucatan is elsewhere.”Robert Smithson, 'Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan', 1969

“This is also in front of the new part of the motel structure—it’s both a motel and a hotel I guess, it’s hard to tell the difference between a motel and a hotel when you come to a structure like this. They seem to intertwine with each other, and lose each other and cancel each other out, so that there is no possibility of knowing where you are.”"This is really the old hotel and you can see that instead of just tearing it down at once they tear it down partially so that you are not deprived of the complete wreckage situation. That's very satisfying actually to me: it's not often that you see buildings being both ripped down and built up at the same time. They really don't know if they want this part of the hotel or not, so it seems very smart to actually just leave it there..."Robert Smithson, 'Hotel Palenque', 1972

On October 1939, writer John L. Stephens and his very sincere friend, artist Frederick Catherwood left New York and traveled to Central America, Chiapas and the Yucatan. They made two trips, in 1839 and 1841, in which they explored the region and documented the vast majority of its known Maya ruins for the first time. Their publication, 'Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan' in 1841, and 'Incidents of Travel in Yucatan' in 1843, became immediate bestsellers and prompted a series of explorers, archaeologists and amateurs to follow their footsteps. The first part of the exhibition presents some of the work of these travelers without pretending to construct a linear history of everyone who ever traveled or registered the Mayan ruins; on the contrary, it traces and presents the changes of representation existing in this landscapes of ruins.

In 1969, American artist Robert Smithson traveled to the Yucatan. During this trip, Smithson wrote the text 'Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan' (its title referring to Stephens and Catherwood’s book), as part of the work he installed and photographed twelve mirrors in nine different locations in what he called 'Yucatan Mirror Displacements (1-9)'. Afterwards, Smithson visited Palenque, where he stayed at Hotel Palenque. The building —half under construction, half in ruins— interested Smithson more than the nearby Maya ruins of the same name. Smithson took a series of photographs of the hotel, and in 1972 gave a talk at the University of Utah where he presented the building’s “entropic” qualities.

The exhibition 'Incidents of Mirror-Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere' is freely inspired in Stephens, Catherwood and Smithson’s travels; it exists in the space created by the reflections, resonances and ruptures produced between their work and that of the travelers, artists, photographers and archaeologists who followed their footsteps. The exhibition also includes a series of works, that although they don't refer directly to Catherwood, Stephens or Smithson, expand the exhibition's scope through artist's research into tourism, archaeology, anthropology or history, and with it further constructing and questioning the landscape of ancient and modern ruins and constructing a new archaeology of the present.

original exhibition drawings by PLB, April 2011

Unfortunately not in the exhibition:Jean Frédéric Maximilien Waldeck, drawings of Palenque in Maya/Arab/Egyptian style, done before Catherwood, published 1864

Desire Charnay, positive print and negative of Uxmal, 1860

Desire Charnay, Mayan types, 1881

Alfred Percival Maudslay in Chichen Itza with hammock, 1889

Alfred Percival Maudslay in Palenque, 1880-1

Ad Reinhardt, 'How to Look at Modern Art in America', PM magazine, June 2, 1946.(to be hung upside down, to be located near Piere Leguillon's posters and in front of Sam Durant's upside town tree)

Marcel Duchamp, 'Fresh Widow', 1920

"This is sort of the door. At first you notice right at the back that it's green, right? There's not really much you can say about it, I mean it's just a green door. We've all seen green doors at one time in our lives. It gives out a sense of universality that way, a sense of kind of global cohesion. The door probably opens to nowhere and closes on nowhere so that we leave the Hotel Palenque with this closed door and return to the University of Utah."Robert Smithson, 'Hotel Palenque', 1972

Carlos Fuentes, 'Chac Mool', short story, 1973read english translation hereyou can see some great youtube videos of USA spanish students acting it here!

EXHIBITIONS, PROJECTS AND TEXTS BY PLB

ABOUT ME

"At the end of the fifteenth of his 'Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind' Schiller states a paradox and makes a promise. He declares that ‘Man is only completely human when he plays’, and assures us that this paradox is capable ‘of bearing the whole edifice of the art of the beautiful and of the still more difficult art of living’. We could reformulate this thought as follows: there exists a specific sensory experience—the aesthetic—that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community. There are different ways of coming to terms with this statement and this promise. You can say that they virtually define the ‘aesthetic illusion’ as a device which merely serves to mask the reality that aesthetic judgement is structured by class domination. In my view that is not the most productive approach..." from
Jacques Rancier, 'The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes', New Left Review 14, April-March 2002

SHORT BIO

Pablo León de la Barra is an exhibition maker, independent curator and researcher. He was born in Mexico City in 1972. León de la Barra has a PhD in History and Theories from the Architectural Association, London. He has curated among other exhibitions ‘To Be Political it Has to Look Nice’ (2003) at apexart and Art in General in New York; ‘PR04 Biennale’ (2004, co-curator) in Puerto Rico; ‘George and Dragon at ICA’ (2005) at the ICA-London; ‘Glory Hole’ (2006) at the Architecture Foundation-London; ‘Sueño de Casa Propia’(2007-2008, in collaboration with Maria Ines Rodriguez) at Centre de Art Contemporaine-Geneve, Casa Encendida-Madrid, Casa del Lago-Mexico City, and Cordoba, Spain; ‘This Is Not America’ at Beta Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); ‘Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at the CCE in Guatemala (2010); ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’, Cerith Wyn Evans at Casa Barragan, Mexico City (2010); ‘Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan and Elsewhere’, at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2011); 'Bananas is my Business: the Southamerican Way' at Museu Carmen Miranda, Rio de Janeiro (co-curated with Julieta Gonzalez, 2011); 'MicroclimaS' at Kunsthalle Zurich (2012); 'Esquemas para una Oda Tropical', Rio de Janeiro, 2012; 'Marta 'Che' Traba' at Museo La Ene, Buenos Aires (2012); Novo Museo Tropical at Teoretica, San Jose, Costa Rica (2012); Museu Labirinto / Museum of Unlimited Growth, ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (2012); The Camino Real Arcades, Lima, Peru (2012). PLB has acted as advisor and/or art curator for the following art fairs: Pinta/London (2010-12), Maco/Mexico (2009-1012), Circa/Puerto Rico (2010), La Otra/Bogota (2009), ArteBA/ Buenos Aires (2012), ArtRio/Rio de Janeiro (2011-2013). León de la Barra has written amongst other publications for: Frog/Paris, PinUp/New York, Purple/Paris, Spike/Austria, Tar/Italy, Wallpaper/London, Celeste/Mexico, Tomo/Mexico, Rufino/Mexico, Ramona/Buenos Aires, Metropolis M/Amsterdam, Numero Cero/Puerto Rico. PLB has also written texts for many artists and exhibition catalogues, lectured internationally and participated in many international symposiums where relevant topics to arts, culture and society have been discussed. PLB was co-director of ‘24-7’ an artists-curatorial collective in London from 2002-2005 and artistic director of ‘Blow de la Barra’ in London from 2005-2008. From 2005 to 2012 he was curator of the White Cubicle Gallery in London, a community art space which he also founded. He is also founder of the Novo Museo Tropical, a museum yet to physically exist somewhere in the tropics and curated the First Bienal Tropical in San Juan Puerto Rico (2011). He is also the publisher of Pablo Internacional Editions and editor of his own blog the Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution. He lives and works between London, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, San Juan, Bogota, Lima, Athens, Beirut...